Seven hundred and twenty episodes across the two main series, eleven feature films, a sequel still being written: Naruto is a mountain of a saga, and a newcomer's first question is always the same. Where do you start, and in what order do you keep going? This guide lays the saga out flat: the exact place of each series, the boundaries of the major arcs, the real role of the eleven movies, and a map of the filler. Episode numbers are those of the Japanese broadcast.
The confusion rarely comes from the story itself. It comes from the number of formats that tell it, each with its own schedule and its own numbering. Four building blocks are enough to sort everything out: one manga, two main anime series, a sequel devoted to the next generation, and a set of feature films that are almost all detachable.
The manga by Masashi Kishimoto ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from September 1999 to November 2014. Seven hundred chapters, seventy-two volumes, not a single episode added to buy time: it is the densest and fastest version of the story. It also acts as the referee. When the anime and the page diverge, the page is what counts. The origins of the series also shed light on several structural choices made along the way.
The first anime series started on TV Tokyo on October 3, 2002 and ended on February 8, 2007, after 220 episodes. It adapts Part I of the manga. The handover was immediate: Naruto Shippuden took over one week later, on February 15, 2007, and ran for ten years until March 23, 2017. Five hundred episodes, the whole of Part II, and a war that fills the entire final third.
Boruto: Naruto Next Generations followed on April 5, 2017, two weeks after the end of Shippuden. Its first part ended on March 26, 2023, at episode 293. The story leaves Naruto for his son, in a Konoha fitted with screens and scientific tools. It is the only one of the three series you can do without and lose nothing of the original story.
That leaves the eleven feature films, released between 2004 and 2015 at a rate of one per summer for nine years, plus a dozen short OVAs shown at festivals or bundled with games. Only two movies belong to the official chronology; the other nine are side stories, enjoyable but inconsequential. The overview of the eleven feature films covers their respective plots.
One last building block often goes unnoticed: the side stories written by Kishimoto himself. Kakashi Gaiden sheds light on the youth of Team 7's leader; Naruto Gaiden, published in 2015, tells of Sarada's investigation between the epilogue of Naruto and the new generation. Both were adapted into episodes, at points the broadcast order makes rather unintuitive. Finally there are also spin-off novels, three of which have been brought to the screen.
Before going into the detail series by series, here is enough to get your bearings in ten seconds. The table gives the actual volume of each block, its broadcast period, the proportion of episodes written by the studio, and its status in the journey.
One figure needs a caveat: the filler share is not an official piece of data. It depends on how you classify mixed episodes, the ones that combine a scene from the manga with a long invented sequence. Depending on the count, Shippuden has between 196 and 203 filler episodes, or 39 to 41% of the total. The order of magnitude, though, does not move: four episodes out of ten do not come from the page.
The "status" column, finally, separates theessential from the optional. Three rows are enough to cover the story from end to end: the first anime series, Naruto Shippuden and the movie The Last. Everything else enriches, extends or diverts, but never governs your understanding of the story.
| Title | Volume | Years | Filler share | Status in the journey |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Naruto | 220 episodes | 2002-2007 | About 41%, or 90 episodes | Essential, entry point |
| Naruto Shippuden | 500 episodes | 2007-2017 | 39 to 41%, or 196 to 203 episodes | Essential, direct sequel |
| Boruto: Naruto Next Generations | 293 episodes | 2017-2023 | High, and highly variable from arc to arc | Optional, first part closed |
| Naruto manga | 700 chapters, 72 volumes | 1999-2014 | None | The source; it prevails in case of divergence |
| The Last: Naruto the Movie | 1 feature film | 2014 | None | Canon, between chapters 699 and 700 |
| Boruto: Naruto the Movie | 1 feature film | 2015 | None | Canon, readapted in the Boruto series |
| The nine other feature films | 9 movies | 2004-2012 | Side stories throughout | Optional, no effect on the main plot |
| OVAs and short films | About a dozen | 2003-2015 | Side stories throughout | Optional, often comedic |
| Boruto: Two Blue Vortex manga | Currently being published | Since 2023 | None | The sequel; anime adaptation in production |
The first series rests on one principle that explains all the rest: it caught up with the manga. The first 135 episodes adapt Part I with no notable dead time. The 85 that follow are missions written by the studio to give Kishimoto time to get ahead. That break at 135 is the most useful landmark in the whole saga.
The opening covers episodes 1 to 19. Five episodes are enough to set the scene: a village, a failed exam, a fox sealed inside a child. Then Team 7 escorts a bridge builder and runs into Zabuza Momochi and his pupil Haku. The mission in the Land of Waves is the first confrontation where the series agrees to kill its characters.
Then come episodes 20 to 67, the longest stretch of Part I. Konoha hosts the Chunin Exams: a rigged written test, survival in the Forest of Death, a one-on-one tournament. Gaara, Rock Lee and Neji come on stage, Orochimaru places his Curse Mark on Sasuke, and the Sharingan becomes a matter of the first importance. The full course of the exam takes up nearly a quarter of the series.
The exam goes off the rails in episodes 68 to 80. Sunagakure and Otogakure attack the village in the middle of the final, the Third Hokage faces his former student, and Naruto settles his score with Gaara at the end of a fight that redefines both characters. The assault on the village leaves Konoha without a leader and closes off the carefree mood of the early days.
In episodes 81 to 100 , Naruto takes to the road with Jiraiya, charged with bringing Tsunade back. The Rasengan is learned there, Itachi and Kisame show themselves for the first time, and the Akatsuki enters the story through a side door. This long trek is followed by six wholly invented episodes, from 101 to 106.
Part I closes on episodes 107 to 135. Sasuke joins Orochimaru, a team led by Shikamaru sets out to bring him back, and each member faces a different opponent. The failed rescue ends at the Valley of the End, beneath the statues of Hashirama and Madara. After that the series enters its tunnel: from 136 to 219, only episodes 141 and 142 keep any material drawn from the manga. Episode 220 closes the whole run out and makes the junction with Shippuden.
The pacing of this first series has aged. Fights drag on, flashbacks repeat, and the animation stays uneven. It is a necessary step : those 135 episodes set up every relationship that Shippuden will later treat as a given. Skipping them is like opening a novel two-thirds of the way in.
Shippuden picks up two and a half years later. Naruto returns from training with Jiraiya, Team 7 no longer exists in its original form, and the Akatsuki goes on the offensive. The arcs get longer, the stakes leave the village for the continent, and the number of characters explodes. The five hundred episodes of the second series read better in blocks than in one sitting.
The first block, episodes 1 to 32, does not contain a single filler episode. The Akatsuki kidnaps Gaara, now Kazekage, to tear his tailed beast out of him. Chiyo comes on stage, Deidara and Sasori show what the organization is capable of, and the series announces from the outset that it will protect no one.
Here too, episodes 33 to 53 come entirely from the manga. Sai and Yamato replace Sasuke and Kakashi on the team, and Orochimaru's trail leads to a spy's rendezvous. The meeting at the Tenchi Bridge puts Naruto face to face with Sasuke for the first time in three years, without anything being settled.
After a long invented detour, episodes 72 to 88 form a compact block around Hidan and Kakuzu. One man's sacrificial ritual, the other's five hearts, and a loss that pushes Naruto toward a new kind of training: the one that will produce the Rasenshuriken.
The emotional heart of the series takes up episodes 113 to 143. Jiraiya leaves to investigate the leader of the Akatsuki, Naruto and Sasuke both go looking for Itachi, and the whole thing ends on a revelation that entirely reframes the Uchiha Clan massacre. Episodes 119 and 120 slot in there: that is Kakashi Gaiden, covered further down.
Then there are episodes 152 to 175 , the ones everyone remembers. The leader of the Akatsuki comes for the Nine-Tails in person, his six bodies reduce the village to a crater, and Naruto returns from Mount Myoboku in Sage Mode. The destruction of Konoha is settled by a conversation, not by a final punch.
Then comes the most political arc of the saga, episodes 197 to 214. The meeting of the five leaders has to decide the fate of the Akatsuki; Sasuke bursts in mid-session, Danzo reveals his hand, and the Fourth Great Ninja War is declared. Few fights, many consequences.
The countdown takes up episodes 215 to 222 then 243 to 256, separated by twenty invented episodes. The Allied Shinobi Forces hide Naruto and Killer Bee on an island off Kumogakure; at the Falls of Truth, Naruto faces his dark side, then wins Kurama's agreement thanks to the memory of his mother.
Then episodes 261 to 479 cover the Fourth Great Ninja War, more than two hundred episodes, a good half of them filler. The Allied Shinobi Forces face an army of reanimated ninja, then Obito, then Madara, and finally Kaguya. Episodes 484 to 493 then adapt two spin-off novels, and 494 to 500 tell the wedding preparations. It is between these two blocks that The Last slips in.
Should you watch Boruto? The question comes up every time, and the answer depends on what you are looking for. The original story ends with Shippuden : nothing that follows is needed to understand it. The sequel opens something else, with its own rules and a distinctly more school-bound tone at the start.
The series starts on April 5, 2017, two weeks after the end of Shippuden. Boruto: Naruto Next Generations follows the son of the Seventh Hokage through an unrecognizable Konoha: trains, screens, scientific tools able to reproduce a technique without years of training. The conflict there is domestic before it is global, which throws off many viewers who came looking for the continuation of a war.
Only three passages matter to someone who has just finished Shippuden. Episodes 19 to 24 adapt Naruto Gaiden: Sarada Uchiha looks there for the truth about her parents and runs into an opponent who came out of Orochimaru's experiments. It is the only story signed by Kishimoto between the epilogue of Naruto and the new generation.
Next, episodes 51 to 66 readapt the movie Boruto: Naruto the Movie in full, Chunin Exams included. Anyone who has already seen the movie can resume at episode 67 without missing a thing; anyone who has not seen it has no reason to hunt it down, since the series tells the same story at greater length.
Beyond that, the first part runs toepisode 293, broadcast on March 26, 2023. It sets up a secret organization, opponents from a celestial bloodline and a mark carved into the hero's hand. The filler rate stays high, with long runs of training missions that have no real bearing on the main plot.
On the page, the Boruto manga has given way to Boruto: Two Blue Vortex, launched on August 20, 2023, written by Kishimoto and drawn by Mikio Ikemoto. A second animated part has been confirmed by the studio, but no broadcast date has been announced to date. For now, then, Boruto remains an open branch of the journey rather than a conclusion.
Eleven feature films came out between 2004 and 2015. Their status varies completely from one to the next. Nine of them are side stories : handsome missions, brand-new opponents, an ending that puts everything back in place and leaves no trace. The last two, on the other hand, really do count.
The placement rule fits in one sentence: a movie is watched between two arcs, never in the middle of a confrontation. For the nine side stories, the insertion point has no real importance; the characters on screen simply have to be consistent with how far the story has come. The markers given below are conveniences, not obligations.
A word on the OVAs, finally. About a dozen short films were screened at festivals, bundled with video games or offered as a curtain-raiser to the movies. None of them is necessary, and most of them lean toward comedy or the exhibition tournament.
Released on August 21, 2004, it sends Team 7 to escort an actress to the Land of Snow. The tone is that of Part I: escort mission, armored opponents, no consequences. Guides usually place it just after the search for Tsunade, around episode 101 of the first series.
The second feature film, released on August 6, 2005. Naruto, Shikamaru and Sakura escort a young girl pursued by knights from a vanished kingdom. It is the movie furthest removed from the ninja world, to the point that its opponents barely use chakra at all. It slips in anywhere in the second half of the first series.
Released on August 5, 2006, it closes out the run of Part I movies. The team escorts a capricious prince and his son to the Land of the Moon, and bets on the relationship between a father and a child rather than on combat. It is the last movie in which Naruto is still twelve years old.
Released on August 4, 2007, it opens the run of movies from the second era. Naruto protects a priestess able to see the death of those around her, and his own death is foretold. The premise is strong, the resolution less so. It is watched in the first third of Shippuden, once the new team is formed.
Released on August 2, 2008, it pits Konoha against an air squadron come to settle an old grudge between villages. Sasuke makes an appearance, which is enough to make it one of the most watched in the run. Its most comfortable place is around episodes 70 to 90 of Shippuden, between two canon arcs.
Released on August 1, 2009, it is the only feature film to give the central role to Kakashi. Holders of hereditary bloodlines go missing, and Konoha considers a sacrifice to avoid another war. The movie extends the village's philosophy without ever contradicting it. It belongs in the first half of Shippuden.
Released on July 31, 2010, it throws Naruto twenty years into the past, into a city of a thousand towers, alongside a blond jonin he does not recognize. The movie plays on that irony from beginning to end. It is one of the few to make use of a figure from the past without ever contradicting the manga.
Released on July 30, 2011, it locks Naruto inside a prison fortress after a rigged accusation. The mood is darker than usual and the pacing is that of a prison-break movie. It has no point of contact with the main plot, which makes it easy to place: any time after the Five Kage Summit.
Released on July 28, 2012, it is the only non-canon movie Kishimoto took direct part in, down to the characters' silhouettes. A genjutsu sends Naruto into a world where his parents are alive and where everyone has the opposite personality. The emotion there is real, which remains rare in this run of feature films.
Released on December 6, 2014, it is the first movie officially built into the story. It is set two years after the war, between chapters 699 and 700 of the manga, and tells of a falling moon and a relationship taking shape. This chapter 699.5 is watched after episode 493 of Shippuden.
Released on August 7, 2015, it serves as a walkway to the next generation: Chunin Exams, an invasion from elsewhere, and a father who has run out of time. Its screenplay comes from Kishimoto. The anime series readapted it in full in episodes 51 to 66, which makes it optional for anyone following Boruto.
The word is frightening, often with reason. In Naruto, a filler episode is an episode written by the studio to give the manga time to move ahead. The mechanism is ordinary on Japanese television; what is less ordinary is the proportion. About four episodes out of ten, in each of the two main series, do not come from the page.
Throwing it all out would be a mistake, though. Some blocks are genuine dead time, others give secondary characters the depth the main plot denies them. The sorting below distinguishes the three useful categories; for the exhaustive list, number by number, the complete inventory of the episodes involved goes much further than this summary.
Two stories written by Kishimoto himself stand outside the main plot. That does not make them optional: one explains the most opaque character in the series, the other links two generations. Their difficulty lies elsewhere, in the place the anime gave them.
Kakashi Gaiden tells of Kakashi's youth: his promotion to the rank of jonin, a wartime mission, and the day that cost him a comrade and gave him an eye. In the manga, this flashback comes early in Part II. The anime moved it to episodes 119 and 120 of Shippuden, under the title Kakashi Chronicles. This story of his youth is regularly recommended earlier, even before the start of the second series.
Moving it up is defensible, with one caveat: it reveals the existence of characters the series deliberately holds back. Leaving it in its broadcast slot costs you nothing. Skipping it, on the other hand, deprives you of the key that makes sense of a good half of the revelations of the war. Two episodes, with no substitute anywhere else.
Naruto Gaiden: The Seventh Hokage and the Scarlet Spring came out in 2015, only about ten chapters long. Sarada, daughter of Sasuke and Sakura, doubts her parentage and sets out to find a father she has practically never seen. There she faces an opponent born of Orochimaru's experiments. The anime adapts it in episodes 19 to 24 of Boruto, very early in the series.
The order to remember is simple: this story belongs after the epilogue of Naruto, at the very beginning of the new generation. Following it in its broadcast slot works perfectly. Watching it on its own, right after Shippuden and The Last, also works and gives a cleaner transition between the two eras.
These two texts share one thing that explains their importance: they fill gaps the main plot leaves open. One makes a teacher's behavior over two hundred episodes intelligible. The other justifies the very existence of the next generation. Neither of them is a decorative bonus.
The same story exists in two versions, and the difference is not only one of format. The manga covers the entire story in 700 chapters and 72 volumes, without a single added episode. A few dozen hours of reading, against 276 hours of animation for the same content, filler included.
What the page gives you is the pacing the author intended. Fights last as long as they should, revelations land without being announced three episodes ahead, and no parasitic mission slots itself between two arcs. What the page does not give you is the voices, the music and the choreography of the fights.
What the anime adds is quite real. Some duels only take on their full scale in motion, and several original arcs give secondary characters a past the manga denies them. The trade-off is a systematic stretching : lengthened conversations, repeated flashbacks, recap episodes placed at the worst moments.
The solution most often chosen is a mixed one. Read Part I, which is also the most dated portion on screen, then switch to the anime for Shippuden, whose animation quality improves markedly. The reverse works too: watch to the end of Part I, then finish in print form to avoid the filler of the war.
One rule settles every disputed case: when the two versions contradict each other, the manga prevails. That holds for staging details as much as for the order of events. The only exceptions are the stories Kishimoto wrote directly for the screen, starting with the movie that closes the relationship between Naruto and Hinata.
That leaves the question of finding your place. The numbers do not match from one format to the other, and no simple table links them. A volume covers between eight and nine chapters; a canon episode sometimes adapts a whole chapter, sometimes a third of a chapter stretched over twenty minutes. Trusting arcs rather than numbers avoids most of the mistakes.
One last practical point: the manga ends at chapter 700, an epilogue set many years later, when the heroes' children enter the Ninja Academy in their turn. The anime, for its part, stops at 500 on the wedding preparations. The two endings do not tell the same moment, which explains part of the confusion around the sequel.
An episode runs about twenty-three minutes, opening and ending credits included. The 720 episodes of Naruto and Shippuden therefore come to roughly 276 hours, or eleven and a half days without a break. At three episodes a day, count on eight months; at five a day, a little under five months.
Setting aside the blocks that are entirely filler, the total falls to around 430 episodes, or about 165 hours. The saving is more than a hundred hours, which explains the popularity of sorting lists. At the same rate of three episodes a day, the journey then drops under five months.
The extensions are counted separately. The eleven feature films add about fifteen hours; the 293 episodes of Boruto's first part add roughly 112 more. A complete journey, everything included and with no filtering at all, goes well past 400 hours.
The first mistake is to start straight in on Shippuden, on the strength of some advice picked up online. The sequel takes two hundred and twenty episodes of setup as a given: the ties between the characters, how the village works, the reason Sasuke left. None of it is explained again along the way.
The second is to skip episode 220. Buried in the filler tunnel that precedes it, it nonetheless adapts chapter 238, makes the join between the two series and sets the starting point of Shippuden. Twenty-three minutes that prevent a sense of a gap.
The third is to apply a list of numbers without reading it. Mixed episodes, very numerous in the first hundred of Shippuden, combine a scene from the manga with a long invented sequence: dropping them costs you decisive lines. The safe rule is to remove only the episodes that are entirely filler.
The fourth is to watch a movie in the middle of an arc. A feature film assumes a team that is free and a village at peace. Slotting it in during an invasion or during the war creates an immediate inconsistency, when waiting for the end of the current block is enough to make everything hold together.
One marker to finish on: no filler episode ever changes the main plot. You can skip fifty in a row without having to go back, and that is precisely what makes sorting risk-free.
The first lever is pure filler. Setting it aside takes you from 720 to about 430 episodes, or 165 hours instead of 276. More than a hundred and ten hours saved without losing a single page of the manga, provided you keep the mixed episodes.
The second is the credit sequences. An opening and an ending run about ninety seconds each, plus the preview of the next episode. Three minutes per episode adds up to twenty-one hours over the canon run, thirty-six over the whole thing.
The third is playback speed. At 1.25×, the remaining 143 hours fall to 115. The dialogue stays intelligible, but the fights lose their breathing room: speeding up transitional episodes and going back to normal speed for the fights remains the healthiest compromise.
Taken together, these three levers bring the marathon down from 276 to about 115 hours, a ratio of one to two and a half. The manga keeps the most radical shortcut: 700 chapters in 72 volumes, a few dozen hours of reading, and the same story through to chapter 700.
The journey fits in a few lines. Naruto, episodes 1 to 135, then episode 220 for the junction. Naruto Shippuden next, from 1 to 493, setting aside the blocks that are entirely filler and keeping the mixed episodes. The Last: Naruto the Movie slots in at that precise point, between chapters 699 and 700 of the manga. Then come episodes 494 to 500, devoted to the wedding, which officially close the second series. Boruto starts after that, with Naruto Gaiden adapted in episodes 19 to 24 and the movie readapted in episodes 51 to 66, up to episode 293. Around this skeleton, everything is optional but nothing is forbidden. The nine non-canon feature films go between two arcs, as the mood takes you, provided you never cut into a fight in progress. Episodes written by the studio are to be sorted rather than deleted: eighty episodes of the first series and a few large blocks of Shippuden can be crossed without regret, while the Twelve Guardian Ninja, Kakashi's Anbu years and Itachi's youth are well worth the detour. Two principles are enough to settle the remaining cases. The first: when the anime and the manga contradict each other, the manga prevails. The second: a filler episode never changes the main plot, which makes every cut reversible. The rest is a matter of pacing, and seven hundred and twenty episodes go by faster than you would think once the sorting is done.
Naruto episodes 1 to 135, then episode 220 for the transition, then Naruto Shippuden from 1 to 493. The movie The Last slots in at that precise point, before episodes 494 to 500 devoted to the wedding. Boruto comes next, with Naruto Gaiden adapted in episodes 19 to 24 and the movie readapted in episodes 51 to 66.
It is not advisable. Shippuden picks up two and a half years after the end of the first series and assumes you know the ties between the characters, Sasuke's departure and how the village works. None of it is explained again. The first 135 episodes of Naruto remain the only real entry point.
About four out of ten in each of the two main series. The first series has roughly 90 filler episodes out of 220, and Shippuden between 196 and 203 out of 500 depending on the count. The gap comes from how mixed episodes are classified, the ones that combine a scene from the manga with an invented sequence.
Only two. The Last: Naruto the Movie, released in 2014, is set between chapters 699 and 700 of the manga. Boruto: Naruto the Movie, released in 2015, was written by Kishimoto and then readapted in full in the Boruto series. The nine other feature films are side stories with no effect on the main plot.
After episode 493 of Naruto Shippuden and before episode 494. The movie takes place two years after the end of the war and leads directly into the wedding preparations told in the last seven episodes of the series. On the manga side, it slots in between chapters 699 and 700.
It is not necessary in order to understand the original story, which ends with Shippuden. Boruto opens a self-contained story, with a more school-bound tone at the start and a high filler rate. Episodes 19 to 24, which adapt Naruto Gaiden, remain interesting even for someone who will go no further.
The manga tells the same story in 700 chapters and 72 volumes, without filler, in a few dozen hours. The anime brings the voices, the music and fights set in motion, but imposes constant stretching. Many people read Part I, which is more dated on screen, then switch to the anime for Shippuden.
About 276 hours for the 720 episodes of Naruto and Shippuden, or eight months at three episodes a day. Setting aside the blocks that are entirely filler, the total comes down to around 165 hours. The eleven movies add about fifteen hours, and the first part of Boruto roughly 112 hours.
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